March 14, 2016

GOP lawmakers... are trying to head off any future local initiatives.... Senate Bill 601 would restrict a town, village, city or county from regulating "containers" made of plastic, paper, cardboard, metal and glass. This would prohibit a community from regulating single use bags at retail locations, including restaurants. Communities also could not impose fees or surcharges on plastic bags and containers....

Good on 'em. Plastic bag bans are anti-environmental (ever wondered how many times you have to use that reusable bag to make it come out even?) and injurious to public health (ever wondered what's living in that reusable bag?).

Of course, I prefer the allowance that bad policy be played out in the laboratories of democracy. So I'm fine with local control of these unimportant issues. Let the E Coli bacteria make enough people sick and they may even rethink their policies.

Where that live and let live attitude must stop is when it could cause externalities. For example, not vaccinating children which makes entire communities susceptible to measles, mumps, rubella and other easily cured diseases is one such case. Forced vaccinations are perfectly acceptable to me, barring profound religious objections within small enough sub-populations that will not leave the wider population at risk.

Our constitution is based on a federal system where states were supposed to have most of the power because decentralization is a good thing.

And many states, in their constitutions or statutes or court rulings, have home rule where villages, towns, cities, and counties have much of the control because decentralization is a good thing. The states generally have the power over educational standards, marriage law, defining felonies, establishing prisons, and most roads.

Plastic bag bans seems dumb to me, but I don't see why this is a state (or federal) issue.

No one knows how much debris makes up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is too large for scientists to trawl. In addition, not all trash floats on the surface. Denser debris can sink centimeters or even several meters beneath the surface, making the vortex’s area nearly impossible to measure.

About 80% of the debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from land-based activities in North America and Asia. Trash from the coast of North America takes about six years to reach the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, while trash from Japan and other Asian countries takes about a year.

The remaining 20% of debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from boaters, offshore oil rigs, and large cargo ships that dump or lose debris directly into the water. The majority of this debris—about 705,000 tons—is fishing nets. More unusual items, such as computer monitors and LEGOs, come from dropped shipping containers.

While many different types of trash enter the ocean, plastics make up the majority of marine debris for two reasons. First, plastic’s durability, low cost, and malleability mean that it’s being used in more and more consumer and industrial products. Second, plastic goods do not biodegrade but instead break down into smaller pieces.

In the ocean, the sun breaks down these plastics into tinier and tinier pieces, a process known as photodegradation. Scientists have collected up to 750,000 bits of microplastic in a single square kilometer of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—that’s about 1.9 million bits per square mile. Most of this debris comes from plastic bags, bottle caps, plastic water bottles, and Styrofoam cups.

I live in a place that bans plastic bags. It was the brainchild of one dipshit councilman from the other side of the island.You walk into a store w/o a bag, and you are juggling everything as you walk out. People now bring opaque cloth bags into stores, which creates shoplifting problems. The reusable bags are filthy.I don't mind paying a few cents per bag, and it is reasonable to allow localities to require this, but a bag ban is f*cking stupid.

Recycling is one of my (several) hobby horses. I live on an island in the middle of the pacific. Energy costs are ridiculous, ~ forty cents per Kwh for residential. All commercial recycling is energy intensive. It is so expensive here that anything you throw in the recycling bin at the transfer station gets put in the landfill anyway or stuck on a diesel-burning barge and shipped to a recycling center thousands of miles away. Or maybe they just dump it in the sea, I don't know. Landfills are a perfectly reasonable way to dispose of waste. Even a huge landfill takes up a few hundred acres in a county that covers thousands of square miles. As long as you treat the runoff and catch and treat what leaks out of it, you are fine.Still, with some people, it is a religion. If there isn't a recycling bin at hand, they'll carry around an empty plastic bottle or aluminum can all day, or try to hide it somewhere. Just throw it in the trash, for God's sake.

Unfortunately we have reached (or are at least getting close) peek "nanny-ism" whereas every single jerk-off with a smug twinge of self-righteousness feels it is their moral duty to save us all from ourselves! We must be nit-picked into submission! The only protection is laws against laws. Well so be it! I much prefer laws against laws than laws. There should be a whole lot less of "telling people what they can and can't do" than there is round here.

There is another name for burying a plastic bag in a landfill. Carbon sequestration. I would think people would be glad to be preventing the petroleum that went into the manufacture of them to go into fuels. Plus the demand for it raises the price of fuels by some amount. Which reduces its use.

But the important thing is that banning plastic makes people who don't think things through feel good, right Amanda?

Henry,Everything has environmental impact. Of course we won't ever get away from polluting our environment to some degree. Deciding which pollutants have the most harmful impact might be a good place to start. You people really can't live without your plastic bags?

Surfactants in detergents are toxic to aquatic life, persist in the environment and break down into additional toxic byproducts, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In a freshwater environment, surfactant-containing detergents break down the protective mucus layer that coats fish, protecting them from parasites and bacteria, according to Lenntech. The reduced surface tension of water also makes it easier for aquatic life to absorb pesticides, phenols and other pollutants in the water. The EPA also advises that surfactants can disrupt the endocrine systems of humans and animals; Lenntech notes that surfactants decrease the breeding rates of aquatic organisms.

I live in Orange County too, but work in Long Beach. I smack myself on the head whenever I stop off at the local Walmart on the way home, and they have to charge me for bags: if only I'd brought one with me (and I guess that's the point).

Amanda, except for that last rhetoric question you've restated what I just wrote. As for me, I really can't live without my reusable Trader Joe's bags made from recycled plastic. Well, I could actually, but I'm happier with the reusables. They're stronger and hold more groceries.

The cost of laundering is pretty important. When my son was a baby there was some outcry about landfills filling up with disposable diapers (now it is k-cups). So I did some research. First, landfills actually weren't filling up with disposable diapers. Second, the environmental cost of washing cloth diapers is extremely high. So I agree with you. Everything has environmental impact.

Burlap bags infused with salmonella? Ew, sounds kind of yucky. Where I live most people have sturdy canvas bags that are washable. I' ve rarely see shoppers with soiled nasty canvas shopping bags. The canvas bags are actually far handier than plastic bags, they hold a lot more.

I personally think the idea of charging for bags is a good one. Have a cost for the externality. People who need a bag pay for it. People who bring their own bag -- perhaps even the one they paid for their last trip -- don't pay.

People Amanda trusts have done all of the research and there is never any possibility that they would compromise their findings to satisfy popular simplistic expectations.

For instance, here is something that really happened: The Sierra Club did the math and figured out that natural gas was a good bridge to a future energy economy. It has half the carbon footprint of coal, none of the mercury, it can be used to support wind and solar because, unlike coal, it can be ramped up quickly if the wind dies, or solar output drops due to unforeseen circumstances like a sunset.

The Sierra Club's members became incensed, screamed that SC had sold out to big natural gas, and their fundraising dropped through the floor as they bled members. They then redid the math, I won's say which math, it's obvious, and came to the conclusion that natural gas was bad.

These are the kinds of scientific studies that back up Amanda's point of view.

I'm curious about something. I know the idea that cloth bags have E.Coli and other bacteria has a factual basis. But is there a single established case of and E.Coli outbreak traced to reusable bags? E.Coli is everywhere. Are we talking a real risk factor or just an anti-reusable talking point?

Plus natural gas, aka methane causes cancer probably. No matter that it is the primary ingredient in a human fart. If methane causes cancer, vegetarians would be dying of colon cancer by the thousands every year.

Henry, you didn't read the article I posted from National Geographic. Not all plastic refuse is going to be buried. If everyone were to be required to bury it that would be a great start. But then about 20% of the ocean plastic garbage patches come from ocean based activity.

"About 80% of the debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from land-based activities in North America and Asia. Trash from the coast of North America takes about six years to reach the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, while trash from Japan and other Asian countries takes about a year.

The remaining 20% of debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from boaters, offshore oil rigs, and large cargo ships that dump or lose debris directly into the water. The majority of this debris—about 705,000 tons—is fishing nets. More unusual items, such as computer monitors and LEGOs, come from dropped shipping containers."

My dog complains. I would have no objection to paying a couple of cents for plastic bags but the enviroNazis would say that impacts poor people. Of course, you could add plastic bags to EBT cards but that would mean less beer.

If there were a true free market there is probably a way to recycle bags but there has to be an incentive. Many years ago, the deposit on soft drinks bottles was refundable and encouraged people to recycle them. Eventually, the money was too tempting to politicians and that "deposit" is no longer refundable.

The researchers tested 84 of the bags for bacteria. They found whopping amounts in all but one bag, and coliform bacteria (suggesting raw-meat or uncooked-food contamination) in half. And yes, the much-feared E. coli was among them -- in 12% of the bags.

If it isn't happening, it would be pretty amazing. Maybe they print an invisible image of the Virgin Mary in them to protect people from these germs.

Everything you do prevents you from doing something else. In this case the effort is wasted. People like their plastic bags, they are useful. Now personally I have a soft spot for the guys who cut down the trees to make the paper bags Whole Foods gives out, but I wouldn't make laws governing how other people to live by to keep them employed.

@tim in vermont. I'm genuinely curious. I've seen those reports. I also know that E.Coli is present all over the place and the E.Coli outbreaks that make the news seem to be tied to specific food-based supply-chain failures. So if reusable bags are an agent, where is the outbreak?

Micahel K, I'd prefer you didn't respond to any of my comments, so please do skip them. Your responses are always over the top and always smack of the grumpy old curmudgeon. "Get off my lawn you damned liberal brat!" Is this how you discuss things with your adult children? Do they ever tell you you sound like an old asshole?

So what would be better is to make the now infamous New York Times Magazine article "Recycling is Garbage" required reading for recycling nutcases from the Church of Gaia.

A trip to yesteryear, 1987 - and the garbage barge Mobro 4000 towed by the Break of Dawn tugboat looking for a landfill where this ripe load of Long Island's finest garbage could be dumped. Finally after six months at sea, the trash was burned in a Brooklyn incinerator. There is a lesson there someplace.

Basically a law forcing people to use cloth bags is equivalent to a law dictating what clothes they wear. It's a fashion accessory. It would be a sumptuary law, but I guess after Obamacare, sumptuary laws are now constitutional:

Traditionally, they were laws that regulated and reinforced social hierarchies and morals through restrictions, often depending upon a person's social rank, on permitted clothing, food, and luxury expenditures.

It is far more likely to be hardly detectable because the infections would be spread over time and a wide area. The potential is there, millions of people are exposed to this hazard, it seems unlikely that a large number of them would be affected in a small area. Read Gravity's Rainbow for a discussion of this topic.

...are trying to head off any future local initiatives.... Senate Bill 601 would restrict a town, village, city or county from regulating "containers" made of plastic, paper, cardboard, metal and glass. This would prohibit a community from regulating single use bags at retail locations, including restaurants.

Think about what this type of ban would do to takeout Chinese Food or Pizza. I don't think you can take the Kun Pao home in your hands and still drive.

Also, these 'environmentally friendly' local communities would be doing this to simply collect the surcharge to fill in budget holes. They don't really care about the environment.

It wouldn't be hard to make a public health case to forbid re-usable bags, if it weren't for the moral preening of so many voters anyway. A similar level of risk discovered in an aircraft would cause the whole fleet to be retrofitted.

The problem with trying to convince somebody that they are engaged in empty moral preening is that moral preening feels so good to the preener that they can't give it up. It's like taking cigarettes from a smoker.

There have been plastic bag, recycle drop offs at nearly grocery store I've used in the last few years. Why not promote that option harder? Why not make contests out of it: whatever boy scout troop collects the most bags gets a prize; the grocery store customer that brings in a certain amount gets a $50 gift card....?

Gadfly, I don't worship any "Gaia". I'm not even the best recycler in my neighborhood, I suspect. I do use plastic quite often, how can one not? I'm hardly a "green" obsessed hippie. I don't buy organic food most times unless it's on sale because it's more expensive and I don't trust it's truly organic anyway. As far as stopping the use of plastic shopping bags goes, I think it's probably one of the easiest steps to take. I don't understand the complete disregard for the things we can easily do to not pollute.

No one is asking you to sacrifice your first child. I think some of you conservatives may actually be far more 'environmentally oriented' than I am, but you folks would be loathe to admit it, lest one of your fellow conservatives would accuse you of being a Gaia worshipping hippy.

Gusty Winds, I've been to restaurants that use paper containers for take home leftovers and paper bags with handles to put the paper container in. Worked as well as plastic. Many fast food places are already using paper exclusively to box up their products.

Has anyone noticed that over the past 20 or so years, the plastic bags have gotten thinner and weaker, such that now any substantial load is double or triple bagged? I assume this is due to a synergy of using less material to save money and using less material to save the planet? Either way, doesn't really matter since the store just gives you more bags.

Anyway, count me a a fan of the "disposable" plastic bags, which in our house are reused as poop bags for the dogs, as garbage bags in the bathrooms or for packing shoes and the like in suitcases.

Amanda, perhaps you could share a picture of the Pacific garbage patch with us. Or maybe point it out on Google Earth. Then perhaps you could explain how garbage bags from Wisconsin end up in the Pacific.

People know that and take precautions. Remember that millions of people are exposed to this risk, so even if it is a 1 in a thousand risk, that's thousands of victims. I am not sure that people wash their lettuce in soap and water when they bring it home, or perhaps they wrap the lettuce in special plastic bags that have been granted indulgences by the Gaia worshipers. Oh I get it, it's all for show and they do get to protect their food with plastic bags! Nevermind!

I think some of you conservatives may actually be far more 'environmentally oriented' than I am, but you folks would be loathe to admit it, lest one of your fellow conservatives would accuse you of being a Gaia worshipping hippy.

I am all for a clean environment. I just think that efforts should be applied to stuff that truly matters. Plastic grocery bags are a symbolic target only. I support fracking, on account of coal has two ounces of mercury per ton, and whatever the truth is about global warming, it certainly makes sense to put less CO2 into the air if it's an option, and natural gas does that very well. I am also for nuclear, with adequate safety standards, of course. Since it is better to lose a small area in the case of an accident than to continue this experiment of putting more and more CO2 into the air. But for those positions I am called a "denier."

"An easy way to prevent foods that won't be cooked from becoming contaminated with bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli is to designate specific bags for specific food categories. “Cross-contamination can occur when juices from raw meat come in contact with cooked or ready-to-eat foods,” explains Mills. You can designate bags by color (red for raw meats, green for fresh produce, blue for prepared food, for example). Or, if you’d rather not use bags that are dyed, label plain bags with a fabric marker.

Use grocery bags for groceries only. Don’t let your kid grab one to carry baseball cleats in or to tote books back to the library. “Microbes from meat or fish that are left behind can leak onto other items. The reverse is true as well — germs from the soles of shoes and sweaty clothes can come in contact with food,” says Mills.

Don’t store bags with the junk in your trunk. The Department of Agriculture recommends keeping reusable shopping bags in a cool, dry place in the garage or house, rather than in the trunk of the car, where heat and humidity can allow germs to flourish. It’s fine to keep your (freshly washed) reusable bags in your car, though, as long as they don’t come in contact with dirty surfaces. Stash them in one big bag or in the glove compartment, suggests Mills.

Keep cold things cold. Insulated bags (also reusable) won’t buy you a lot of time in terms of keeping foods out of the danger zone (between 40 degrees F and 140 degrees F). Even so, they’re a good safety precaution. “There might be an unpredictable or incidental circumstance like a flat tire or phone call that prevents you from going straight home to load cold items home to the refrigerator or freezer,” explains Mills."

For all of those that are going on about GOP and local control, etc. Notice, this is not that. This is additional local restrictions that have a ripple effect. CA does this to the rest of the country all of the time. They pass higher restrictions on gas or car exhaust or some amount of whatever in some-such and in order to try and contain costs, businesses have to change what everyone gets to meet what CA wants, as it is too expensive to just modify the CA version. The result is everyone pays a marginally higher cost to support CA's nuttiness. If CA had to completely bear the costs of all of their nutty screwing with things, there would be a lot less of it.

All of these additional local restrictions/changes do the same thing. How is a nation-wide chain to maintain any level of cost control when each locality in the country can pass different local restrictions? In one local, you must use water soluble ink. In another, bio-degradable plastic bags that are guaranteed to break down after no more than 6 years, in another the bags must contain anti-bacterial agents, etc. After a while the incremental costs become so great that the business pulls out of the area or has to raise prices so high they become too expensive or they leave the market. In all cases, citizens are the losers. You could argue they deserve it because they elected these nannies but (like in the case of CA) in a lot of cases, others outside of that area are forced to pay a price as well.

There is a difference between trying to manage a society so that we all get along and just being a self-important nag who likes to control other people...

So Amanda will be sending everybody to re-education camps to learn how to safely handle re-usable bags then, that were mandated to replace the existing safe bags. We can call them Joycamps! That's what Orwell called them, of course Hillary called them "Fun camps."

We need to make sure everybody learns this and practices it because we are not just banning the bags for people smart enough to take the extra precautions required for the replacements, but everybody, and no fair pointing out that some parents will inevitably fail at this and their innocent children will be the victims! Mass indoctrination is the only answer!

I don't think my city takes the plastic bags and dumps them in the ocean. Any ocean.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a black friend who is convinced the city does not pick up garbage on the street in his part of town with the same regularity as mine. I had to tell him that in my part of town people don't heave their garbage out the window. Upon reflection he agreed. And laughed.

I do it both ways but the bring-your-own-bag thing is mainly an affectation. Slows down the lines. Most people who use them have constant resting bitch face.

I think eating out is probably far more hazardous to your health than using a cloth shopping bag, but I don't see anyone here voicing any concerns about all the restaurant based cases of food poisoning we hear about so often. I don't buy the argument that one shouldn't use cloth shopping bags due to contamination.

I think eating out is probably far more hazardous to your health than using a cloth shopping bag, but I don't see anyone here voicing any concerns about all the restaurant based cases of food poisoning we hear about so often.

Tim, I'm not in favor of reeducation camps, unless they're really fun like Camp Idontwannapollutenomo. If I was the camp matron, y'all would come out nicer kinder gentler environmentalists and would go forth and sin no more, singing the praises of Mother Gaia.

The Chipolte chain is having its come to Jesus understanding of what it means to "buy local" and avoid "gmo" and source this and source thatl People are puking and shitting streams from that pius chow.

They make us use paper bags if you don't have your own reusable bag. So I have tons of paper bags that I end up burning in the burn barrel or on the garden trimmings pile.

My Father and Step Mother go on a lot of cruises and are constantly picking up the courtesy bags from the cruise lines. Princes, Viking, Royal Caribbean etc. So they give them to me.....when I use them for those small purchase visits, I feel so swank. Whipping out a Royal Caribbean bag as if it is nothing....which for me it is, because they were given to me. LOL

At least at Winco, they still use plastic bags. When you are buying 5 to 10 bags of groceries at a time, plastic is the only way to go. Easy to carry....AND reusable for cat litter and lining the bathroom waste baskets.

Tim, I often wash the canvas bags I shop with. I only use two certain bags for meat. I do launder them in hot water, using bleach and detergent (sorry Mother Gaia!) after each time I use them. I'd be embarrased to shop with cloth bags that appear soiled. I don't keep the bags in the trunk of my car most times as I do try to hang them in an area in which there is good air circulation. When I get home I immediatly take the meat products and take them out of their store wrappers and wash them in cold water and rebag them in ziplock plastic bags (forgive me Mother Gaia!!) before freezing.

traditionalguy said...The key will be new plastic eating bacteria. Trash comes from breaking the re-cycle cycle.

The pure Green and the pure Conservative are only pure in their own minds.

3/14/16, 3:27 PM

Not sure how big a fan of that technology I am. It is all about the "unintended consequences". One man's exciting, plastic garbage eating bacteria is another man's "why is my plastic green house collapsing?". How do you "contain" it and "control" it so that it only eats the plastic you want it to eat, when you want it to eat it? How do you prevent it from mutating out of your control? Remember dodo happens.

is there a single established case of and E.Coli outbreak traced to reusable bags?

As someone else pointed out, an "outbreak" occurs when E. coli is in the general food supply, resulting in a lot of people being exposed due to the same event. (For example, a restaurant with contaminated lettuce - you'll see an outbreak because a lot of people ate the lettuce at that restaurant at more or less the same time.) With general risks over much of the population, you don't see an "outbreak"; instead, you see a general rise in E. coli infection.

In this case of the bag ban, you'd expect to see such a general rise in affected areas, corresponding to the time the ban was put in place. And lo, here we are....

I am a fan of having as clean an environment as reasonably possible, but this monomaniacal focus on the poor little CO2 molecule is idiotic - and leads to things like VW producing TDIs with great mileage (yay! less CO2) which just happen to spew obscene amounts of NOx real pollutants which really harm people, animals and plants - unlike plant-food CO2.

One of the few issues (along with indoor smoking) where I actually with the bat-shit statists. People can use cloth bags (and if you're too shiftless to wash them, oh well) and we won't have to look at the plastic bags blown into every roadside, gutter, and vacant lot. I actually find that a very conservative idea.

@Terry said: "I live on an island in the middle of the pacific. Energy costs are ridiculous, ~ forty cents per Kwh for residential."

Then you must live, I would guess, on Kauai or Maui county. On Oahu, the present cost is about 32 cents per kWh, although the price has been as high as 35 cents/kWh. The manager of Honolulu's Trash-to-Energy plant says he actually likes plastic bags because they generate more electricity when they are burned than do paper bags. Before we got a ban on plastic bags, I saved many hundreds of them. I recycle each bag at least 4 or 5 times, which makes them more energy efficient by far than paper bags. And for 3.5 cents per bag, I bought another thousand bags---a lifetime's supply---from Amazon. In the meantime, a lot of stores are now using biodegradable plastic bags, which solves the problem for which the plastic ban was originally seen as the solution, namely, plastic bags in the ocean. The fact is that in over 4 decades of year round beach outings and diving and sailing, I cannot recall ever once seeing a plastic bag floating in the water offshore. Go figure.

Wow! Remember that these bits can't be seen with the naked eye! There are 1 million bacteria in a cubic centimeter of ocean water. So let's say they are 100 times the size of a bacteria. That's 1/10th of a liter of litter per square mile!

You know what produces this kind of pollution? Poverty, you know what produces poverty? Socialism. It works every time it's tried. Were you around when the Soviet Union collapsed and the environmental disaster that was socialism in Europe was revealed? Who was responsible for burning uranium laced brown coal in Europe? Socialists. Who was responsible for safety at Chernobyl? Socialists.

"The Cracker Emcee said...One of the few issues (along with indoor smoking) where I actually with the bat-shit statists. People can use cloth bags (and if you're too shiftless to wash them, oh well) and we won't have to look at the plastic bags blown into every roadside, gutter, and vacant lot. I actually find that a very conservative idea."

"People can use cloth bags (and if you're too shiftless to wash them, oh well) and we won't have to look at the plastic bags blown into every roadside, gutter, and vacant lot. I actually find that a very conservative idea."

"Very dangerous thinking. The path to tyranny."-----------Bad think Cracker Emcee! Be careful, before long you'll be called a Gaia worshipping hippie.

Requires retail stores to charge a minimum of 5 cents for paper carryout bags of 1/8 barrel (882 cubic inches) or larger. These are typical grocery bags with a flat bottom greater than 60 square inches.

Requires retail stores to show all bag-charges on customer receipts; stores keep all revenue. The charge is a taxable retail sale.

Allows retail stores, at their discretion, to charge for smaller bags or provide them free.

Allows retail stores to provide carryout bags made of plastic 2.25 mil or thicker, with or without charge at their discretion.

Requires that bags to which the 5-cent charge applies contain at least 40 percent post-consumer recycled fiber and display the minimum recycled content on the outside of the bag. Use of recycled fiber and labeling is encouraged for all sizes of paper bags.

Imposes a $250 fine for violations.[on whom?]

Promotes reusable carryout bags as the best alternative to single-use plastic bags.

Reusable bags aren't, they rip, tear and things poke through. A plastic bag that then is a garbage liner compared to a reusable that fails after a few uses and then cannot be a liner is very probably using more resources.

OMG this E. Coli meme is hilarious! What panickers. Yall have no idea what you're talking about. "They rip." Oh boo hoo. Anyway, no they don't. And like plastic bags don't. But really, the E. Coli panic is too much.

A bunch of comments criticize Republicans for centralizing the decision about bags from municipalities to the state. But, paradoxically, Republicans have decentralized the decision about bags from municipalities to the individual.

I am old enough, just barely, to remember when the most powerful argument of the Left was in favor of individual freedom. Many of the rules society makes, went the argument, aren't intended to you any good or any good to anyone. Rules like boys wearing their hair short and girls having to wear skirts or dresses were arbitrary, and only existed to make you acknowledge that you weren't in charge, and you had to do what you were told. Instead, your individuality should be celebrated, not suppressed, and society would be better for it.Things changed once the Left took over society's institutions, didn't it?

I'm not a big fan of plastic bags from Sentry Hilldale, FWIW -- too thick to pick up, nimbly, small dog waste. (They're very sturdy though) I would be bummed if they banned the more useful plastic bags that are used to purchase produce, or bulk items. Those are great for dog use.

We periodically get a supply of bags from non-dog-owning relatives, and that's great because our little dog is never one to go for a walk without making a deposit. So we're always running low.

We also have an oversupply of cloth bags and reuseable plastic bags. Sometimes I remember them, sometimes I don't.

Blogger RC3 said...A bunch of comments criticize Republicans for centralizing the decision about bags from municipalities to the state. But, paradoxically, Republicans have decentralized the decision about bags from municipalities to the individual.

"A bunch of comments criticize Republicans for centralizing the decision about bags from municipalities to the state. But, paradoxically, Republicans have decentralized the decision about bags from municipalities to the individual."

Exactly. To hear the lefties, you'd think the GOP had passed laws requiring people to use & discard multiple plastic bags per day.

Dust Bunny: " I have tons of paper bags that I end up burning in the burn barrel or on the garden trimmings pile."

Paper grocery bags are the absolute best thing to dump a large hot pot of pop corn into. Wide mouth, no spill. A little salt, fold over, shake. Paper pulls some of the extra oil off the pop corn. Stays fresh and tasty overnight (the corn, not the bag).

We were fortunate to pick one up when we passed through Laredo which had (gasp!) passed a plastic bag ban while we were not looking.

No one knows how much debris makes up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is too large for scientists to trawl. In addition, not all trash floats on the surface. Denser debris can sink centimeters or even several meters beneath the surface, making the vortex’s area nearly impossible to measure.

And yet we can say with certainty how thick the polar ice caps are or are not? How much warming (or not) is occurring and what's to blame for it?

Scott McGlasson said...No one knows how much debris makes up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is too large for scientists to trawl. In addition, not all trash floats on the surface. Denser debris can sink centimeters or even several meters beneath the surface, making the vortex’s area nearly impossible to measure.

And yet we can say with certainty how thick the polar ice caps are or are not? How much warming (or not) is occurring and what's to blame for it?

The amount of debris that makes up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 7. All 7 of the debris are the result of global warming.

This was not done out of any concern for individual liberty; this was done to advance business interests over local interests. As noted in the linked article: "Retailers and business groups, however, are concerned that bans on bags in individual communities would lead to a patchwork of regulation and higher business costs." (The business aspect of this was commented on by Todd @ 2:58.)

No one seems to have mentioned, yet, that states have the right, under their constitution and the federal constitution, to make laws like this. Don't like it? Change your state constitution. Most are easier to change then the federal constitution (the Supreme Court notwithstanding).

. . . In a research paper for the Wharton School Institute for Law and Economics, law professors Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright crunched state and federal data on emergency room admissions and food-borne-illness deaths and figured that the San Francisco ban "led to an increase in infections immediately upon implementation."They found a 46 percent rise in food-borne-illness deaths. The bottom line: "Our results suggest that the San Francisco ban led to, conservatively, 5.4 annual additional deaths." . . .

I think that the next step is to simply label anything the left does no approve of as "nazi" something. Not global warming, but nazi warming. Not carbon dioxide, bit nazi dioxide. Not patriotism, but nazism. Not fossil fuels, but nazi fuels. Who could be in favor of creating electricity with nazi fuels or filling their gas tank with nazi fuels?

Who cares if you, or children, get sick. This is not seat bellts or smoke detectors.

"and we won't have to look at the plastic bags blown into every roadside, gutter, and vacant lot."

I have never seen more tahn an occasional plastic bag in the street. I don't know what you are talking about. The only problem with plastic bags is that they tear, and can't hold the weight of what is put into them, if it consists primarily of water, or solid things like books.

Having people carry their own bags is like what went on in Soviet Russia in the 1980s, because there people did that then.

There is no evidence that a ban on bags in Wisconsin would have any impact on the amount of plastic in the ocean.

It's all about feelings.

It's like cutting down on carbon dioxide emissions.

It's a proposal that sounds like something that might happen on a voluntary basis, only forced. Governments can get much more directly at anything, and there's no need for interfering in people's lives this way.

....then they came for the thermostats in business buildings, but Ronald Reagan was elected president, and he got rid of that regulation, first thing. Too bad he didn't have the guts to get rid of registration for the draft, but that caused limited practical harm.

Amanda, if you are still reading this thread, I would like to say that "President Mom Jeans" is a disgusting troll and I have no why he does what he does, but I think a lot of the commenters here are glad you come here even if we don't agree with much of what you say. I think he should be banned for that comment, or if he thinks his advice is so good, maybe he should take it himself.

...then they came for the tryptophan (in 1988) because there was some contamination with trytophan made in China, and, even though they discovered the reason, the prohibition remained.

And there was something for morning sickness. The actual active ingredient was Vitamin B6 - Votamin B6 worked alone - but it couldn't be advertised, because no one is allowed to advertise that a vitamin is a cure for any disease or condition, but only a nutritional supplement, although in can be mentioned in books and medical artivles, provided the people selling the book are not also trying to sell the vitamin.

And attempts to bring it (Vitamin B6) back as a treatment for morning sickness involve mixing something laregly or entirely irrelevant with the Vitamin B6, or processing it in a special way, so that it could be patented, and enormous money charged for it, in part to make up for the cost of steering it through the F.D.A. drug approval process.

And then they came for the paper prescriptions, (to be prohibited in New York State as of March 27, 2016) forcing a choice of pharmacy at the time, and if the pharmacy is closed or out of stock, the doctor would have to be called to cancel the prescription and prescribe again.

It's legal if the prescription is filled out of state, or for something that doesn't actually require a prescription, because it is not a pharmaceutical, but irt is prescribed maybe in order to get re-imbursed, like crutches or a wheelchair.

Bottom line: In most Seattle stores they will sell you a nice paper bag for a nickel.

3/14/16, 4:31 PM

I am generally in favor of people getting what they vote for, good and hard. The harder the better. You want to enact laws to control what foods are allowed to be sold, great! You want to pass a law making more stuff "cancer causing", fantastic! You want to pass a $15 an hour minimum wage? Why stop there, make it $25! People should be free to screw with themselves as much as they like and in many cases the only way to show them the folly of their ways is to let them get their way.

The problem with much of this is the "spillage". What they do does not always stay local, even if no one else wants it. As I noted up stream, CA does this to the rest of the country ALL THE TIME! I am fine with CA screwing up their own state as much as they want, heck, I encourage it so that it serves as an example to the other 49. The problem is that there are so many nutters in CA that the market is so large most businesses need to make the CA standard the country standard and as a result everyone pays for CA's cray-cray. That is NOT what democracy looks like but I can not think of a way to stop it other than if a handful of other states passing laws in opposition of the CA crazy making the CA mandates illegal and I can not imagine getting enough buy-in from other states to make this happen...

This is a complex issue and voters should consider every aspect.It's spring. Revealing trees and bushes festooned with plastic shopping bags of various hues. This must be stopped.One way to eliminate this problem is to cut down the trees and manufacture paper bags.Thank you.Vote.